NSA claims know-how to ensure no illegal spying

In this file photo taken Wednesday, April 21, 2010, shows then Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper called the disclosure of an Internet surveillance program "reprehensible" Thursday June 6, 2013 and said it risks Americans' security. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

WASHINGTON >> The supersecret agency with the power
and legal authority to gather electronic communications worldwide to
hunt U.S. adversaries says it has the technical know-how to ensure it's
not illegally spying on Americans.

But mistakes do happen in
data-sifting conducted mostly by machines, not humans. Sometimes, former
intelligence officials say, that means intelligence agencies destroy
material they should not have seen, passed to them by the Fort Meade,
Md.-based National Security Agency.

The eavesdropping,
code-breaking agency is fighting back after last week's revelations in
the media of two surveillance programs that have raised privacy
concerns.

One program collects hundreds of millions of U.S. phone
records. The second gathers audio, video, email, photographic and
Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas, and probably some
Americans in the process, who use major providers such as Microsoft,
Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

The programs were first reported in a
series of articles published by The Guardian newspaper. On Sunday it
identified Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American who works as contract
employee at the National Security Agency, as the source of the
disclosures. The newspaper said it was publishing the identity of
Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee
of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at his request.

The
National Security Agency filed a criminal report with the Justice
Department earlier this week in relation to the leaks. The director of
national intelligence, James Clapper, has stated repeatedly that the
NSA's programs do not target U.S. citizens and that the agency uses a
process known as "minimization" to sift out data from "any U.S. persons
whose communications might be incidentally intercepted."

His
statement Saturday said that "the dissemination of information about
U.S. persons is expressly prohibited unless it is necessary to
understand foreign intelligence ... is evidence of a crime or indicates a
threat of death or serious bodily harm."

While the NSA has
deferred any public comment to Clapper, it did offer an internal article
written by director of compliance John DeLong, who is in charge of
making sure the NSA protects Americans' privacy.

DeLong writes
that privacy protections are being written into the technology that
sifts the information, "which allows us to augment — not wholly replace —
human safeguards."

The NSA also uses "technology to record and
review our activities. ... Sometimes, where appropriate, we even embed
legal and policy guidance directly into our IT architecture."

What
that means is that the data sifting is mostly done not by humans, but
by computers, following complicated algorithms telling them what to look
for and who has a right to see it, according to Ronald Marks, a former
CIA official.

"Through software, you can search for key words and
key phrases linking a communication to a particular group or individual
that would fire it off to individual agencies that have interest in it,"
just like Amazon or Google scans millions of emails and purchases to
track consumer preferences, explained Marks, author of "Spying in
America in the Post 9/11 World."

Detailed algorithms try to
determine whether something is U.S. citizen-related or not. "It shows
analysts, 'we've got a U.S. citizen here, so we've got to be careful
with it,'" he said.

But the process isn't perfect, and sometimes what should be private information reaches agencies not authorized to see it.

In
that case, there are policies in place to "destroy that kind of
information not file it or keep it if an American's name coincidentally
or serendipitously comes up," John Negroponte, the first director of
national intelligence, said in an Associated Press interview Friday.

Marks
said that "when information gets sent to the CIA that shouldn't, it
gets destroyed, and a note sent back to NSA saying, 'You shouldn't have
sent that.'" He added, "Mistakes get made, but my own experience on the
inside of it is, they tend to be really careful about it."

Michael
Hayden, who led both the NSA and CIA, said the government doesn't touch
the phone records unless an individual is connected to terrorism.

He
described on "Fox News Sunday" how it works if a U.S. intelligence
agent seized a cellphone at a terrorist hideout in Pakistan.

"It's
the first time you've ever had that cellphone number. You know it's
related to terrorism because of the pocket litter you've gotten in that
operation," Hayden said. "You simply ask that database, 'Hey, any of you
phone numbers in there ever talked to this phone number in
Waziristan?'"

Hayden said the Obama administration had expanded
the scope of the surveillance, but that oversight by lawmakers and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court also had grown because of
changes in the law.

U.S. lawmakers who appeared on the Sunday talk shows argued the pros and cons of the surveillance programs.

The
head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of
California, told ABC's "This Week" that the phone program had helped
disrupt a 2009 plot to bomb New York City's subways and played a role in
the case against an American who scouted targets in Mumbai, India,
before a deadly terrorist attack there in 2008.

Democratic Sen.
Mark Udall of Colorado said on CNN's "State of the Union" that he was
not "convinced that the collection of this vast trove of data has led to
disruption of plots" against the U.S. He also said he expects "the
government to protect my privacy, and it feels like that isn't what's
been happening."

The NSA was founded in 1952, but only years later was it publicly acknowledged, which explains the nickname, "No Such Agency."

The
agency also includes the Central Security Service, the military arm of
code-breakers who work jointly with the agency. The two services have
their headquarters on a compound that's technically part of Fort Meade,
though it's slightly set apart from the 5,000-acre Army base.

Visible
from a main highway, the tightly guarded compound requires the highest
of clearances to enter and is equipped with electronic means to ward off
an attack by hackers.

Other NSA facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado and Hawaii
duplicate much of the headquarters' brain and computer power in case a
terrorist attack takes out the main location, though each focuses on a
different part of the globe.

A new million-square-foot storage
facility in Salt Lake City will give the agency untold additional
capacity to store the massive amounts of data it collects, as well as
adding to its analytical capability.

"NSA is the elephant of the
U.S. intelligence community, the biggest organization by far with the
most capability and (literally) the most memory," said former senior CIA
official Bruce Riedel, who now runs the Brookings Intelligence Project.

NSA's
experts include mathematicians and cryptologists, a term that means
everything from breaking codes to learning and translating multiple
foreign languages. There also are computer hackers who engage in
offensive attacks like the one the U.S. and Israel are widely believed
to have been part of, planting the Stuxnet virus into Iranian nuclear
hardware, damaging Iran's nuclear development program in 2010.

NSA
workers are notoriously secretive. They're known for keeping their
families in the dark about what they do, including their hunt for terror
mastermind Osama bin Laden. NSA code-breakers were an essential part of
the team that tracked down bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan in 2011.

Their
mission tracking al-Qaida and related terrorist groups continues, with
NSA analysts and operators sent out to every conflict zone and overseas
U.S. post, in addition to surveillance and analysis conducted at
headquarters outside Washington.

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Slowwrote:

So who do you trust, Clapper or Snowden? I remember a United States I could trust. Or maybe I was naive.

on June 9,2013 | 10:55AM

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Maneki_Nekowrote:

As Yoda says, "The spin, deep it is with this one."

on June 9,2013 | 11:28AM

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ya_thinkwrote:

Clapper or anyone from this administration is not one I would trust, most all of them have already been caught lying.

on June 9,2013 | 11:32AM

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ya_thinkwrote:

My question is are the people of this country that naive to think that even though the NSA is collecting all this info from everyone in this country that they are not listening to our phone calls or reading our emails?????

on June 9,2013 | 11:34AM

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kuroiwajwrote:

Interesting, for this issue follows my reading of the interview with Mr. Snowden. You know what, I trust Mr. Snowden, for he is an American hero. We just completed the Congressional Gold Medal event in Hawaii a month ago, about the honor awarded the WWII men and women who served in the 100th, 442nd, MIS, and 1399th. Included in the event was the story about those of Japanese ancestry spied on by their own Country and later interned. The AJA's believed and trusted in their Country with many giving their lives for what they believed. Today, I have lost my trust of our President and his administration, the leaders of our Congress, and some of the Judges in the Judiciary who continue supporting the spying on Americans. It's not a Democrate v. Republican issue as when a few months ago some believed politics played a roll with the Benghazi situation. It's a full blown trust issue following the IRS, DOJ, NSA, DOL, HHS, DOD, and WH going after Americans and our Constitution. We must get rid of the instigators begining today and start the re-organization and down-sizing of the Federal Government through shifing many of the responsibilities back to the States.

on June 9,2013 | 12:18PM

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DocDenwrote:

"NSA claims know-how to ensure no illegal spying."- Sounds convincing, even if NSA is making up the rules.

on June 9,2013 | 08:08PM

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st1dwrote:

saying that the nsa "has the technical know-how to ensure it's not illegally spying on Americans" is not the same as saying the nsa is not conducting illegal spying on americans.

ironic that a president who promised to have an open government, bills available on line for citizens to read, and a transparent government has stonewalled the state department response on benghazi, ordered irs and epa harassment of conservative groups, forced health deform programs on americans, orchastrated voter fraud, expanded increased entitlement payments to core democratic voters and directed the nsa in monitoring of americans' communications.